Max couldn’t take it anymore. He slapped himself hard in the face. “It’s all my fault!” he screamed. “I broke the sink! I did it! You hate me, both of you!”
“Max!” Diane set her mouth in a hard line, but her eyes were panicked. “Don’t start that. You are not allowed to hit yourself. Remember what Dr. Dhang told you. Max! Breathe.” She began taking slow, deep, exaggerated breaths, as if she could breathe for him.
“I’m going to kill myself!” he cried.
I don’t know what would have happened if Penn hadn’t shown up at that moment.
“Howdy!” he called from the front door. “How come nobody invited me to the pool party?”
“Mom’s mad,” Max explained. He was breathing again.
“Imagine that,” said Penn, lifting his feet carefully so as not to splash the walls he had painted last summer. “If you two ladies will step out of the bathroom for a moment, I’ll reach under there and turn that thing off before somebody drowns in here.”
Relieved, Diane scooted into the hall. As much as she hates to call Penn and ask him for help, she’s delighted when he shows up.
As Penn worked under the sink, I watched the muscles move under his T-shirt. He buys his shirts at the Salvation Army thrift store. This one had Employee of the Month printed across the back. I’m not a pervert or anything, but Penn has really broad shoulders. When he’s cutting the grass and he takes off his jacket, he hangs it over one shoulder. If my fiancé, Billy, tried that, the jacket would fall right off. Billy is gorgeous, and I would never cheat on him, but I’m just saying.
Diane was coming back from the kitchen with a plastic garbage bag. “Where did we get all this junk?”
“Planned obsolescence is one of the finer tools of capitalism,” said Penn, his head still stuck in the cabinet. “Reduce time between repeat purchases. Practice inferior workmanship. Change the color.” He pulled his head out of the cabinet. “Seen any avocado-green kitchen appliances lately?”
“Grandma painted hers,” said Max.
“They grew up in the Depression,” said Diane. “They don’t throw anything away.”
I kept a sharp lookout for the stack of gray notebooks, but no luck. Diane could be dangerous on these rampages.
“My tae kwon do medal!” cried Max, grabbing her arm as she shoved the medal into her plastic bag. “I love that medal. Don’t throw it out!”
I don’t even know how Max got the participation medal, because he did not participate. When he was supposed to choon bee and belt out “Yah,” he covered his eyes and screamed, “Mama!”
“Chariot!” Master Seo would roar, facing him with his lethal-weapon body, but he couldn’t hold Max’s attention. “You mama’s boy?” he demanded.
Then Max would scream, “Mama!”
“Just take a picture of the medal,” Diane said, but he had already pulled it out of the bag and was trotting back to his room. Diane shook her head and started muttering about how we have too much stuff, how our stuff owns us, how nice it would be—
“Don’t go on a cleaning binge,” I warned her. “Remember what happened last time.”
“I know, I know,” she said, brushing me off with a wave of her hand as she headed toward her room. “I’m only going to sort—I promise. I’ll start with my sock drawer.”
“You have OCD,” I reminded her. “It starts with just one sock …”
An intervention was called for, but Penn pulled his head from under the sink.
“Look here, Aris. I want to show you what to do if this ever happens again.” I knelt down beside him and pretended to look under the sink. “See that knob? You turn it to the right.”
“Right,” I said. On the floor, eye level with Penn, I recognized the opportunity to encourage his romantic leanings toward Diane. Even if he didn’t have these leanings, they could be encouraged.
Looking down, I sighed wearily. Then I did it again, a little louder.
“What’s up?” Penn asked.
“Diane is on Match.com again.”
“Is she, now?” He tapped a pipe with a wrench to hear the sound of it. “Finding anybody wonderful?”
“Mostly the same losers who were on there last year. I recognized Bearhug64 and Lonely911.”
“I remember him. He sees the glass as half-full, not half-empty. Seeks a Christian lady, but you can leave your baggage at the door?” He stood up and smiled. “Or was that somebody else? They all seem so much alike after a while.”
“I keep telling her. Then she says, ‘I used to look at Barbies with you and say the same thing.’ ”
He laughed. “Come on. Let’s go out on the back porch and have a smoke.”
Outside, I climbed onto the railing and sat with my feet in front of me, leaning back against the wall of the house. This seat is more comfortable than it sounds. Then I let out another dramatic sigh, hoping Penn wouldn’t change the subject the way he does sometimes.
“It’s such a challenge to find your soul mate in Where Its Legs Were Broken Off,” I said.
“You ain’t wrong.” He tightened the rope he uses to hold up his jeans, then pulled a package of Bugler tobacco from his back pocket and rolled a cigarette. Despite the fact that Penn is unemployed and lives with his mother, he’s a chick magnet. Diane and I only catch glimpses of these girls, the back of a shiny blond head in his truck, a soprano coming through the speaker on his phone. They don’t last long because Penn uses the zigzag method on them. Penn likes women, but he doesn’t like relationships. We can’t imagine what he does when he goes out with a girl, because he doesn’t eat or sleep or touch people. Once, Max asked him if he was an alien. Then Penn said, “Now I’ll have to kill you.”
“It’s harder for a widow to date,” I said with another sigh. “Diane doesn’t have an ex-husband to keep the children every other weekend, and so many men don’t want the burden of another man’s offspring.”
Penn exhaled over his shoulder, keeping the smoke away from me.
“Remember Arnold?” I asked. “From two years ago?”
“The one who graduated from high school? No, wait a second. He’s the one with man boobs. Sorry.”
Arnold materialized from Match.com in January, an after-Christmas sale item. Arnold liked everything about Diane except for the fact that she had two children under the age of twenty, but he didn’t tell her that until she had made him dinner for a year. “I know he’s not pretty,” she said, “but I think he looks a little like Harvey Keitel in The Piano.” Arnold was butt-ugly. When she brought him to the talent show at the Lab, I had to go around introducing him as “my mother’s boyfriend.” Which sounds so wrong.
“Just say, ‘my mother’s friend,’ ” Diane suggested. Ms. Chu once gave me a copy of a story called “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” which is hilarious if you haven’t read it, so I started calling him Arnold Friend, after the freakish guy in the story. Now Kate and I refer to any mother’s boyfriend as “Mr. Friend.”
Penn pulled a folded New York Times crossword puzzle out of his back pocket and started to work on it with a stub of pencil. Apparently, he was finished discussing Diane’s love life. I briefly considered giving up on him as future father material. Of course, I had never come out and asked him to date my mother. The closest she ever got to asking him out was shooting him a text when she was fed up with us:
Kids 4 Sale. BOGO. Throw in a cute dog. Free.
He responded:
Can’t afford the upkeep.
“Got it!” he cried, slapping his hand on the crossword puzzle. “A-N-T-I-L-E-G-O-M-E-N-A. You know what that means, Aris?”
“The disputed books of the Bible?”
“Yes, and that’s all of them, in my opinion. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—all Antilegomena. The Old Testament? ‘And the unicorns shall come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls.’ Isaiah 34:7. Unicorns, Aris?”
“Maybe that was a typo,” I suggested.
“Maybe the Bible is full of typos. I’ll b
e an atheist until the edited version comes out.”
“Diane says you baked too long in the Pentecostal church when you were young,” I said.
“Well, I guess she baked too long in the Baptist church.”
“She did. That’s how she became an alcoholic and then found her higher power in AA.”
“Exchanging one unicorn for another,” said Penn. He ground out his cigarette, flicked the butt, and went back inside. Through the glass door, I watched him linger by the open door of Diane’s bedroom. She was on the phone now. From her frown, I gathered she was talking to Grandma. Penn gave her a pope wave, and then he was gone.
When I came inside, she was saying crisply, “Mother, calm down. I didn’t say we were moving today. I said we had options. Kanuga really isn’t a good fit for us. Am I supposed to wait until you die before I live my life?”
I’ve heard this conversation a million times. I know everybody’s lines. Grandma will tell Diane that she’s ungrateful. Diane will deny it. Then Grandma will tell Diane that she can’t make it on her own, not with two children to support, not without a husband. Offended, Diane will retort that she can take care of her family. Finally, just when you think Diane is about to win the argument for independence, Grandma will pull the Papa card.
“It would kill your father.”
Now Diane was telling Grandma that she had narcissistic personality disorder. She was spelling it for her, N-A-R …
Sometimes eavesdropping just wears me out.
I had to step away from the family drama to get back to work on my novel; the clock was ticking! I got my laptop and my mad bomber hat and went out to my office. My office is in the backyard, on the roof of the shed. Often when I’m wearing the mad bomber hat, especially with the earmuffs turned up, my ghost dad speaks to me. This evening, I thought he might help me write the setting for my novel. As Write a Novel in Thirty Days! points out, “Nothing happens Nowhere.” I gazed out over my world, considering the sign at the entrance of our subdivision:
THE ORCHARD IS A VIBRANT COMMUNITY
FULL OF FUN PEOPLE WITH MUCH TO OFFER.
That’s a stretch. The Orchard is a community of people who want to avoid the bad elements but can’t afford a McMansion. Diane calls it “the fruit bowl.” She regrets allowing her parents to ship us down to Georgia after Joe died. If she had had more faith in herself, or more money, she says, she would have made a different decision. Papa bought this house at 17 Plum Lane for us to live in, for free, but he owns it. When Diane took the liberty of painting the green shutters purple, Papa painted them green again, to keep up the value of the property. If he invests in a major change, like redoing the kitchen, he makes her promise to stay here for five more years. She saves boxes in the attic for the day we might move out of Kanuga to someplace where we fit in, but that place is always changing: Taos, New Mexico; the Marshall Islands; Victory, Vermont; Singapore …
Write a Novel in Thirty Days! states that your story has to be grounded in the here and now; it doesn’t matter where. The author suggests using five senses to create the setting. Only five? Okeydokey, here is my subdivision in Kanuga, Georgia:
THE SETTING
The fruit-bowl smell: Dirty-sock smell from the Bradford pear trees, the stink of the paper mill, and on Saturday mornings, a medley of laundry detergents, which is so strong that I worry about global warming before I’ve even had breakfast.
The fruit-bowl feel: The dirt in the yard is actually clay; it feels damp and stretchy. It’s orange with streaks of yellow and brown and sometimes white. When I was little, I used it to make dishes for my dollhouse. I always scraped out the streaks of white clay, which was probably PCB. Back in the fifties, the Georgia Power plant down the street sold buckets of PCB to the Orchard residents to use as bug killer in their flower gardens. Papa says there is no PCB in our yard. He likes to help people and would hate to think he is killing us.
The fruit-bowl sound: Dogs barking behind fences, the bleep of car fobs, the BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP of stuck car alarms, and the honk of vacationing geese.
The fruit-bowl taste: The dirt around here tastes like the tofu corn dogs Diane tries to sneak into our hot dog buns. She says, “You put so much ketchup on it I can’t believe you’d notice!” Right, Diane.
The fruit-bowl sights: My least favorite sight in the Orchard is the roadkill at the intersection of Plum Lane and Pear Street. I swear that spot is haunted. There is almost always a dead possum or a dead cat there, especially on Saturday mornings after the teenagers have taken their mothers’ SUVs out on the town and come home drunk. Blood, fur, and guts.
My favorite sight is the blue heron that lives by the lake on Muscadine Circle. He is a bluish gray, the color of your shadow on the driveway on a winter afternoon, with a spooky beard that hangs like a broken cobweb around his neck. He stands apart from the silly ducks but never really leaves them. Sometimes I wonder if he’s a ghost. If you walk up to him, he’ll fly off ahead of you into a cluster of pine trees or over a chain link fence, but when you turn around, he’s behind you in a long blue shadow. Diane says he’s looking for his mate. IMO, he’s never going to find her in that bunch of ducks, but birds aren’t exactly brilliant.
There are things you can’t see in the neighborhood, like the pedophiles. Diane has located them on an Internet map. She drove us around one day and pointed out which houses to avoid: 4 Muscadine Circle, 28 Apple Lane, 9 Cherry Branch Drive. Diane is paranoid about pedophiles. I don’t know what I expected to see—body parts of children hanging from Bradford pear trees? Blood, fur, and guts? The houses looked normal. Diane says that’s what’s so scary. We never got to see an actual pedophile, but you don’t really see people in the Orchard.
I closed my laptop and looked around to see if I had missed anything. Most of the daylight was used up, but there were still a few blue streaks in the gray sky. When a cloud appeared, it turned lavender, and suddenly the whole sky looked like a picture of heaven. I knew I couldn’t add that image to my description because it was trite—writers should never be trite. Writers should also never mention unicorns, even though the cloud had taken on the shape of a horse with a horn growing on its forehead. I was embarrassed for the author of the Bible verse with the unicorn in it. Didn’t he/she know an atheist like Penn would read that and sneer? But maybe Penn was right. Maybe if you couldn’t describe something, like God, it didn’t exist.
When it finally got dark, I went inside the house. I put Max to bed with a bunch of Legos and his stuffed platypus, Fred, and ran a bubble bath for Diane. Then I climbed into my bed, put my headphones on, and turned out the lights. I was listening to “Greensleeves,” a sad, beautiful song. Most people don’t know that it’s about a prostitute. Diane told me that Joe used to play “Greensleeves” on his sax for his mother, back in Houma. He sang it to me when I was in Diane’s womb. Now, if it comes on the radio, she snaps it off. That night I played it four times, but Joe didn’t appear. Maybe he was down in the shed, planning a way to turn it into a proper office for me, with electricity and a bay window. Maybe he was still mad that I opened Diane’s journal.
Or maybe he suspected that I was going to read all of them.
RISING ACTION
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
—William Shakespeare
When life gets hard, Diane likes to remind me that I’m tough. This is the way she was raised. Papa used to slap her on the back, hitting her spine with his heavy gold Masonic ring, and say, “You’re a Montgomery; you’re tough.” Diane tells me something different. She slaps me on the back and reminds me what Mrs. Kierkegaard wrote on my final kindergarten report card: “This girl could get herself out of quicksand.”
Mrs. Kierkegaard did not say that Max could get himself out of quicksand. “Max is all heart,” Mrs. Kierkegaard said. “I want to marry Max.” When Max was in her class, she asked him, in that serious, respectful v
oice she uses with her kindergartners, to marry her.
He looked way up at her—she’s very tall—met her gaze with those big brown eyes, and said, “Yes, ma’am.” She was the only one who could decipher his drawings.
“My God!” she exclaimed on parent-teacher conference day. “Would you look at this drawing!” Diane and I, wearing our best casual dresses, sat beside each other on tiny plastic chairs and passed the drawings back and forth.
“This one,” said Mrs. Kierkegaard, holding up a manila sheet covered with violent scribbling. “Do you know what this is?”
We shook our heads.
“This is an army of aliens, with curly tails and three arms and four legs. You see, here’s one of the tails. They’re fighting an army of these birdlike creatures from Earth. They rose up out of the Pacific Ocean, Max told me. He calls it the Specific Ocean. This black thing in the middle is an explosion caused by the friction of these two planets that skidded into each other when the orbit around the sun was reversed.” She looked at us, her eyes wide. “This is what Max is thinking.”
We nodded. “Is that the sun?” Diane asked hopefully, pointing to an orange blob.
“No, that’s the pizza the aliens ordered,” said Mrs. Kierkegaard, smiling radiantly at us. “None of my other students are doing this kind of work.” She waved her arm dismissively at a row of artwork attached to a clothesline. In these drawings, I noted a vase of flowers, a big green tree with a bird in it, and a crooked house with smoke coming out of the chimney, all quite recognizable.
“I mean, my God,” she said. “He is so talented. So wonderful. He’s just … Max.” We nodded, but none of us could say exactly how he was going to find his place in the world.
After the flood came the quicksand. Max has no talent for getting out of quicksand—that’s my specialty—but we were going to need all of his creative juices to survive Diane’s cleaning spree.
On Monday morning, Diane woke up with uncharacteristic enthusiasm at the first ring of her alarm clock. She made the coffee, put on her cleaning overalls and red bandana, and turned on her favorite cleaning music, Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Diane believes in classical music. Unfortunately, she has the Montgomery musical genes, so she can’t actually hear it. When an aria on her playlist gets stuck on repeat, she doesn’t realize it.
How to Write a Novel Page 4
